Well, having grown up eating great food from my mom and my gourmet aunt, who grew most of her veggies all year long back in the 50"s - 60's I had some great food. My mom made excellent jello salads, a few of them I will still make to this day when the craving strikes me. Sad to say, they do not taste the same because ingredients today are not the same as they were back then. Del Monte green beans were a heck of a lot better, so was milk, cream, orange juice. Most stores did not have the availability of fresh produce we have now. Our family was fortunate in that between my aunt and grandfather, we ate fresh produce, had fresh eggs, chicken,rabbit, and fish all the time. When I married in 1963, jello salads were still the rage, and I loved them. They consisted of fresh veggies, shrimp, cream cheese, mandarin oranges, avocado, that sort of thing. I only remember mom using lime jello and my favorite was the one with grated onions, cream cheese, a can of mandarin oranges and grapefruit segments ( you can't get that anymore) and maybe celery.

My grandparents came here from the Azores and grandma made a pot of dried beans everyday because grandpa insisted on having his beans. They were delicious although I grew tired of having them everyday. Grandma made the best chicken soup I have ever tasted and I learned when I got older that she kept a bottle of white wine hidden in a cabinet and added it to the soup when no one was looking. I feel fortunate that I did not grow up on fast food, like so many kids today do. So even though we ate Del Monte green beans, jello salads, meat loaf, and lots of casseroles, we were always very healthy, no one was overweight or even had that problem. I can imagine that 50 years from now, folks will look back on what we are eating and groan.

Dale, that could be fun. I too could riff on the meatloaf and green beans, but using fresh or frozen. Canned? No way!The potato ring has possibilities too, but I would pass on using any canned pork product.

Doug

If God didn't want me to eat animals, why did He make them out of meat?

Lileks is funny but the sad truth is that you can pick up any cookbook from the 1920's and find similar horrors. Every era has its own 'take' on food and those become dated very easily (unless the author is actually a great chef). I have a book, somewhere, that compares cookbooks and ingredients across 100 years in America (or something like that).

Jeff Grossman/NYC wrote:This is a fine moment to tout one of my very favorite internet sites: "Feeding America", a transcription of 76 historical cookbooks. It is endlessly fascinating to me.http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/

Wow - great site, Jeff! The first cookbook I looked at ("Buckeye Cookery") has a quote on the title page: "Bad dinners go hand in hand with total depravity, while a properly fed man is already half saved."

Jeff Grossman/NYC wrote:Lileks is funny but the sad truth is that you can pick up any cookbook from the 1920's and find similar horrors. Every era has its own 'take' on food and those become dated very easily (unless the author is actually a great chef). I have a book, somewhere, that compares cookbooks and ingredients across 100 years in America (or something like that).

You're so right. I have my mother-in-law's totally worn copy of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. It was her Bible, but she wasn't much of a cook. Her mother was, however--she's the one who cooked all the good food Bob remembers from his childhood--and the same book was her Bible too. And I also have HER copy and it's full of all kinds of wonderful handwritten notes and stuffed with newspaper clippings. It's as wonderful a record of one woman's ways in the kitchen as there could be. The cool thing is, though the editions are close to being alike, one was printed during WWII and it was edited to address the circumstances of a society lacking certain things due to the war effort, so there's emphasis on doing without meat or trying to incorporate 'variety meats', as they call the less popular innards, into their dishes.

My wine shopping and I have never had a problem. Just a perpetual race between the bankruptcy court and Hell.--Rogov

I was given a very old ccokbook years ago called The White House Cookbook or something similar. Yes they made jello salads, casseroles and meatloaf and called it gourmet food! I had fun reading it. Then donated to the museum in Eureka, Ca. Times were tough during WW11. I was 5 years old when it ended and remember having to eat creamed tuna on toast, a lot, even after the war ended. I told my mom not to give me anymore of that stuff, cause I was not going to eat it anymore. I never saw it on the table again.. By then, grandpa had his gardens growing, chichens producing and other animals being raised for food.

Karen/NoCA wrote:I was given a very old ccokbook years ago called The White House Cookbook or something similar. Yes they made jello salads, casseroles and meatloaf and called it gourmet food! I had fun reading it. Then donated to the museum in Eureka, Ca. Times were tough during WW11. I was 5 years old when it ended and remember having to eat creamed tuna on toast, a lot, even after the war ended. I told my mom not to give me anymore of that stuff, cause I was not going to eat it anymore. I never saw it on the table again.. By then, grandpa had his gardens growing, chichens producing and other animals being raised for food.

It could have been worse, Karen. My dad, a WWII Army vet, told horror stories about creamed chipped beef on toast, which the GIs affectionately dubbed SOS. I will let you work out what that stood for. He had some Army surplus K rations, which were pretty miserable to taste, but in his estimation still preferable to the dreaded SOS.

I actually enjoyed creamed chipped beef on toast -- I'm a sucker for things that are salty, and my Mom made it fairly often in the early years (maybe the 1950's). I haven't thought about it for ages but I would probably make it for memory's sake if I could figure out to get the chipped beef. If I remember it came in a small glass jar with a pry-off lid so you could use the jar as a drinking glass after the beef was gone. Dad was in the Army Air Force in WWII and probably got acquainted with it then.

Frank Deis wrote:I actually enjoyed creamed chipped beef on toast -- I'm a sucker for things that are salty, and my Mom made it fairly often in the early years (maybe the 1950's). I haven't thought about it for ages but I would probably make it for memory's sake if I could figure out to get the chipped beef. If I remember it came in a small glass jar with a pry-off lid so you could use the jar as a drinking glass after the beef was gone. Dad was in the Army Air Force in WWII and probably got acquainted with it then.

Did she make it out of the salty dried beef in the jar? My dad and his wife used to make it as a brunch item, over poached eggs on English muffins. I skipped the egg but loved the rest.

My wine shopping and I have never had a problem. Just a perpetual race between the bankruptcy court and Hell.--Rogov

Yes, Jenise. Hormel still sells jars of "Dried Beef" and now that I think of it I believe I have seen that more recently in hors d'oeuvres and appetizers, imagine it wrapped around cream cheese or in a wrap. So I would just need to find the right grocery store, or the right aisle in my regular grocery store.

Spam is another thing Mom used to feed us, and I was pretty glad to get away from that. But when I started getting into Japanese food, and I learned that Hawaiians love Spam and make Spam musube, I had to buy some and try it. It's a "comfort food" for Obama. You fry up slices of spam until browned around the edges, and make a kind of "ice cream sandwich" with Japanese sushi rice and wrap it with black nori seaweed, and it's a musube. Pretty tasty.

Frank Deis wrote:Yes, Jenise. Hormel still sells jars of "Dried Beef" and now that I think of it I believe I have seen that more recently in hors d'oeuvres and appetizers, imagine it wrapped around cream cheese or in a wrap. So I would just need to find the right grocery store, or the right aisle in my regular grocery store.

Spam is another thing Mom used to feed us, and I was pretty glad to get away from that. But when I started getting into Japanese food, and I learned that Hawaiians love Spam and make Spam musube, I had to buy some and try it. It's a "comfort food" for Obama. You fry up slices of spam until browned around the edges, and make a kind of "ice cream sandwich" with Japanese sushi rice and wrap it with black nori seaweed, and it's a musube. Pretty tasty.

Our New Year's Eve tradition is to spend it with a group of families, one of which is Japanese. They always bring several big tupperware containers of Spam musube. Everyone - especially the kids - loves it. One of my daughters specifically requested to to be served at one of her birthday parties. There's some Hawaiian food I'm not fond of - particularly the gloppy macaroni salad - but the musube is great stuff.

Frank Deis wrote:I actually enjoyed creamed chipped beef on toast -- I'm a sucker for things that are salty, and my Mom made it fairly often in the early years (maybe the 1950's). I haven't thought about it for ages but I would probably make it for memory's sake if I could figure out to get the chipped beef. If I remember it came in a small glass jar with a pry-off lid so you could use the jar as a drinking glass after the beef was gone. Dad was in the Army Air Force in WWII and probably got acquainted with it then.

Some of us were damn near raised on SOS with either chipped beef or sausage gravy on toast.

Hormel! Yes, that's the stuff. Funny, I know for a fact that a jar was always in our pantry growing up--sometimes mom would let us kids share one as a snack, we LOVED that salty beef and what our family used as 'juice glasses' came from the containers!, but I can't recall her using it in anything.

Later, during my first marriage, a neighbor introduced me to a dish in which chicken breasts were wrapped in that beef and baked under a sauce made from cream of celery soup and sour cream for serving on rice. Seriously, it was just that primitive, everything straight out of the container. Wouldn't make it today but I loved it then!

My wine shopping and I have never had a problem. Just a perpetual race between the bankruptcy court and Hell.--Rogov

I once bought one that was faked in plastic and had bad stuff embedded in it like whole sardines (heads included) and maybe some insects. It sat on the table untouched with no comment through a whole buffet because that's what usually happened with Jello moulds (the only exception being if you had some weird aunt or uncle that actually liked the stuff, but that was rare). I took it home and used the fake one again. Don't remember what happened to it, probably abandoned it and it passed without comment into the great trashbin somewhere. Always wondered if anyone tried to cut themselves a chunk.